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Mapping out Trump’s unlikely road to victory

Which is kind of like saying there are a lot of ways to walk from his resort in Miami to his apartment in New York.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks to supporters at an event in Miami on Wednesday. Florida is one of several key states that Trump must win if he is to have any chance of victory. (CARLO ALLEGRI / REUTERS)

Can he do it? Yes, it’s theoretically possible. Will he be able to do it? There are a whole lot of obstacles in his way, it seems unlikely, and it could get ugly.

The presidential election has appeared to tighten in the last two weeks. But Hillary Clinton remains the heavy favourite, and electoral math is the reason why.

In short: Trump needs to win basically every competitive swing state, plus protect all the now-competitive states, like Arizona and Utah and Georgia, that Mitt Romney won last time.

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It is, of course, possible. Talk of a Clinton “firewall” may be too comfortable: if Clinton’s standing falls nationally, analyst Nate Silver wrote Tuesday, she is not going to be immune in the swing states she has been leading.

And the race is hardly the looming landslide it seemed a couple weeks ago that it might be. Clinton leads by an average of two points in national polls, according to RealClearPolitics.

If the national popular vote becomes a near-tie, Silver wrote, friendly states like Colorado and New Hampshire become “toss-ups” and Clinton goes from a massive favourite to merely sizable favourite in the Rust Belt.

“Yes, Donald Trump has a path to victory,” Silver wrote.

Again, it’s not an easy one. Even the surprise return of her email scandal on Friday, when FBI director James Comey informed Congress that investigators would be probing her emails once more, did not have a noticeable impact in a spate of polls released on Wednesday. Clinton’s probability of winning, according to number-crunching models, is somewhere between 70 per cent and 97 per cent.

But, just for the sake of mental preparedness, here are some of the theoretical ways the unthinkable could happen — along with some reasons it likely won’t.

The Pennsylvania path

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Trump’s most straightforward path to 270 electoral votes has always been to flip three big states Barack Obama won in 2012 over Romney: Florida, with 29 electoral votes; Ohio, with 18 electoral votes; and Pennsylvania, with 20 electoral votes.

Trump has been ahead in Ohio in most October polls, including a five-point lead in a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. So far so good for the guys in the red hats.

Florida, with its large Hispanic and black populations, is tougher for him. He has trailed by two percentage points and one percentage point in the last two polls, and Clinton has a far superior get-out-the-vote operation. But he is leading in the polling average, and there is some Democratic concern about a drop-off in black turnout, so say he takes it.

Then there is Pennsylvania, with its struggling post-industrial towns of disaffected Democrats and conservative rural communities that can seem far more southern than northeastern.

No Republican has won Pennsylvania since 1988. Trump has not led in any poll there since July. But his deficit has narrowed, to five points from more than nine in the summer, and he insisted at his Orlando rally on Wednesday that “a lot of people are saying that Pennsylvania is looking very good.”

It is not clear who those people are, but there you go: a hypothetical Donald Trump presidency.

The Rust Belt path

Democrats held their breath until 1 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. There had been few high-quality polls of Wisconsin, and a new one was coming out.

It showed Clinton with a six-point lead.

If Trump can’t win Pennsylvania, he needs to make up those electoral votes somewhere. He has consistently led in one state where Obama beat Romney, Iowa, but that’s only six electoral votes. So he has turned his attention to two other states with a higher-than-average proportion of white working-class voters, Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) and Michigan (16 electoral votes).

Trump’s campaign, heavy on white nostalgia and antipathy to trade deals, was supposed to excite enough members of the white working class to transform the map by changing long-held presences in the Rust Belt. It hasn’t happened yet, but Trump is now making a major advertising push.

Dave Wasserman, an analyst for the Cook Political Report and FiveThirtyEight, wrote on Twitter that Trump’s “path of least resistance” looks like this: Ohio, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, the Maine district that offers its own electoral vote, plus Wisconsin.

Trump visited Wisconsin again on Tuesday. Until the new poll, by Marquette University, came out on Wednesday, some Democratic voters were concerned that he knew something they didn’t.

But Democrat Matt McDermott, a pollster and senior analyst at Whitman Insight Strategies, said his push into Wisconsin and Michigan, where he is down about seven points in public polls, is more an indication of desperation than a confident campaign “expanding the map.”

“When you’re sitting a week before a presidential election and needing to move into states to get you to 270 that you essentially have discounted up to this point, that’s not exactly a sign of strength. It’s a sign that your path to 270 is essentially nonexistent and you need to find a new path,” he said.

The North Carolina plus Nevada plus . . . something else path

Yes, this is vague, but here we go.

Romney narrowly won North Carolina. Clinton has been leading there. But at least two recent polls have showed Trump with a lead. In six-electoral vote Nevada, another competitive Obama win, a Wednesday CNN poll — widely mocked and dismissed, but a poll nonetheless — showed Trump with a six-point lead.

Win both of those states, plus Florida and Ohio and Iowa and the Maine district, and he is four electoral votes away. Maybe something crazy happens somewhere. A sudden change of heart among moderate suburban Republicans in Colorado? A massive polling failure in comfortable-Clinton-country Virginia?

Hard to fathom, but we’re trying our best here.

What we’re skipping

Focusing entirely on Trump’s potential gains from 2012 — as some sweating Democrats have been doing — overlooks his chances of losing states that Romney won in 2012. Utah, whose Mormon community is more strongly opposed to Trump than any other conservative demographic group, has turned into a three-way battleground involving not only Clinton but little-known independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin. And massive anti-Trump Hispanic turnout would give Clinton a real chance in formerly deep-red Arizona.

“Trump is fighting from a position of real disadvantage. Any Republican would have had this disadvantage because of the demographic changes that have taken place in the United States,” said University of Kentucky political science professor Stephen Voss.

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